Fifty-One Tales quotes

Fame singing in the highways, and trifling as she sang, with sordid adventurers, passed the poet by.

And still the poet made for her little chaplets of song, to deck her forehead in the courts of Time: and still she wore instead the worthless garlands, that boisterous citizens flung to her in the ways, made out of perishable things.

And Fame turned her back on him and walked away, but in departing she looked over her shoulder and smiled at him as she had not smiled before, and, almost speaking in a whisper, said:

“I will meet you in the graveyard at the back of the Workhouse in a hundred years.”

Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.

It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of …

“I am the last,” he said.

No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.

And, when they saw there, suddenly in the twilight, that old recumbent god, they stopped in their running and whispered among themselves.

“How silly he looks,” they said, and thereat they laughed a little.

And at the sound of their laughter Pan leaped up and the gravel flew from his hooves.

Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust.

Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face.

I do not care that she is ugly, nor that she has painted her face, so that she only lure his secret from Time.

I do not care that she is ugly, nor that she has painted her face, so that she only lure his secret from Time.

Time dallies like a fool at her feet when he should be smiting cities.

Time never wearies of her silly smile.

And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And everyone spoke of the swallows and the South.

“I think I shall go South myself next year,” said a hen.

And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the year wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the poultry discussed the departure of the hen.

“We have been to the South,” they said, “and the valleys beyond the sea.”

But the poultry would not agree that there was a sea in the South: “You should hear our hen,” they said.

All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships.

When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea.

For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first.

There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.

“And why,” I asked, “do you laugh at serious work?”

“Why, yer bloomin’ life ’ull go by like a wind,” he said, “and yer ’ole silly civilization ’ull be tidied up in a few centuries.”

Then he fell to laughing again and this time audibly; and, laughing still, faded back through the wall again and into the eternity from which he had come.

Those at adjacent tables might have noticed the young man continually addressing the empty chair and carrying on a monologue with it throughout his elaborate dinner.

“I think you knew my father,” he said to it over the soup.

“I sent for you this evening,” he continued, “because I want you to do me a good turn; in fact I must insist on it.”

She may not after all be as lovely as Helen of Troy. Was Helen very lovely? Not when you knew her, perhaps. You were lucky in Cleopatra, you must have known her when she was in her prime.

“You never knew the mermaids nor the fairies nor the lovely goddesses of long ago, that’s where we have the best of you.”

He was silent when the waiters came to his table, but rambled merrily on as soon as they left, still turned to the empty chair.

In the Olympian courts Love laughed at Death, because he was unsightly, and because She couldn’t help it, and because he never did anything worth doing, and because She would.

And Death hated being laughed at, and used to brood apart thinking only of his wrongs and of what he could do to end this intolerable treatment.

Then Death came close and began to mouth at him. And after a while Odysseus turned and spoke. And “Well, old servant,” he said, “have your masters been kind to you since I made you work for me round Ilion?”

And Death for some while stood mute, for he thought of the laughter of Love.

Then “Come now,” said Odysseus, “lend me your shoulder,” and he leaning heavily on that bony joint, they went together through the open door.

Two dark young men in a foreign southern land sat at a restaurant table with one woman.

And on the woman’s plate was a small orange which had an evil laughter in its heart.

And both of the men would be looking at the woman all the time, and they ate little and they drank much.

The flowers were right in the stride of that advancing city, and thence I heard them sending up their cry. And then I heard, beating musically up wind, the voice of Pan reproving them from Arcady—

“Be patient a little, these things are not for long.”

And they said to him:

“If you think we have time for that sort of nonsense nowadays you cannot know much of the progress of modern commerce.”

And then the poet wept for he said: “Alas! They are damned.”

“If you think we have time for that sort of nonsense nowadays you cannot know much of the progress of modern commerce.”

And then the poet wept for he said: “Alas! They are damned.”

“And you?” said the Saint to her of the demimonde.

“I wanted money,” said the demimondaine.

And after some moments’ thought the Saint said: “Well, come in; though you don’t deserve to.”

Two hundred generations ago (generations, I mean, of roses) this was a village street; there was a floral decadence when they left their simple life and the roses came from the wilderness to clamber round houses of men.

Of all the memories of that little village, of all the cottages that stood there, of all the men and women whose homes they were, nothing remains but a more beautiful blush on the faces of the roses.

I hope that when London is clean passed away and the defeated fields come back again, like an exiled people returning after a war, they may find some beautiful thing to remind them of it all;

And I shook him by the hand I do not know how many times. I said: “We feared you were dead. We feared you were dead.” And he answered sadly:

“No. No. I have sinned too deeply on the Spanish seas: I am not allowed to die.”

“And as I said this she faintly yet perceptibly shook her head.

And it was only then I remembered my youth was gone, and she dead forty years.

”

“O,” said the people on shore. “We thought you were sunk at sea.”

“Sunk at sea?” sang the sailors. “We could not be sunk at sea⁠—we had the gods on board.”

“I am Fame,” said Notoriety.

Then Fame stole softly away so that no one knew she had gone.

And Notoriety presently went forth and all her worshippers rose and followed after, and she led them, as was most meet, to her native Pit.

And after a while his rival drew near to him.

“There comes that damned Tortoise,” said the Hare, and he got up and ran as hard as could be so that he should not let the Tortoise beat him.

“Those ears will win,” said his friends. “Those ears will win; and establish upon an incontestable footing the truth of what we have said.” And some of them turned to the backers of the Tortoise and said: “What about your beast now?”

… Tortoise and a very few of the beasts saw it far off from a high bare hill that was at the edge of the trees, and they hurriedly called a meeting to decide what messenger they should send to warn the beasts in the forest.

They sent the Tortoise.

“Dead,” said he that was humble among the gods.

“The worlds are not forever; only song is immortal.”

“Look! Look!” he said. “There will be a new one soon.”

Children began to know that daisies blew in unfrequented corners.

Buttonholes began to appear in the coats of the young men. The work of Spring was accomplished.

But Man hated gloom either in beast or god, and it made him unhappy to see his adversary’s discomfort, all the more because he was the cause, and still he tried to cheer him.

“Have you not slain the Dinatherium?” he said. “Have you not put out the Moon? Why! you will beat me yet.”

And with a dry and barking sound Death wept and nothing said; and presently Man arose and went wondering away;

“But at this time of year?” I said. “Is it usual in June?”

“We are not what we seem,” said he.

“Oh, I see,” I said, “you are doing it for a joke.”

“Some great thing has been here,” one said, “in these huge places.” “It was the mammoth,” said one. “Something greater than he,” said another.

And then they found that the greatest thing in the world had been the dreams of man.

I heard the wrangling voices, glad with commerce, rise up from the city. And then I also departed, for there was an ominous look on the face of the sky.

And only a thousand years later I passed that way, and there was nothing, even among the weeds, of what had been that city.

They brought a newspaper and looked up the patent medicines; they gave him the foods that it recommended for invalids, and a little medicine as prescribed in the paper. They gave him some milk and borax, such as children drink in England.

Death arose ravening, strong, and strode again through the cities.

“All that is beautiful he crushes down as a big man tramples daises, all that is fairest. How very fair are the little children of men.

It is autumn with all the world, and the stars weep to see it.

“Therefore no longer be the friend of Time, who will not let us be, and be not good to him but pity us, and let lovely things live on for the sake of our tears.”

And the woman was very glad that she owned a sphinx: but the sphinx stared long into her eyes one day, and softly asked a riddle of the woman.

And the woman could not answer, and she died.

And the sphinx is silent again and none knows what she will do.

“How can you reconcile it with your conscience as a Minister of Grace,” I said, “to inflict such a punishment?” (They talked like this in the city whence I had come and I could not avoid the habit of it.)

“They have invented a new cheap yeast,” said the angel.

I looked at the legend on the walls of the hell that the angel was building, the words were written in flame, every fifteen seconds they changed their color, “Yeasto, the great new yeast, it builds up body and brain, and something more.”

“It is very hard to prove,” I said, “that the yeast is as bad as you think.

“After all,” I said, “they must live.”

And the angel made no answer but went on building his hell.

And he answered: “

The mist is the company of a multitude of souls who never saw the Downs, and now are dead.

Therefore they come up weeping into the Downs, who are dead and never saw them.”

“Is it true what they say?” said the brown one.

“Caw,” said the black one.

“Is it true that he cannot live many centuries?”

“My anemones are dead for miles,” she said, “all my woods are fallen and still the cities grow. My child Man is unhappy and my other children are dying, and still the cities grow and you have forgotten me!”

And then he turned angrily on her, almost stopping in that stride of his that began when the stars were made.

“When have I ever forgotten you?” he said, “or when forsaken you ever? Did I not throw down Babylon for you? And is not Nineveh gone? Where is Persepolis that troubled you? Where Tarshish and Tyre? And you have said I forget you.”

And an old wanderer walking with a stick came by and the blackbird flew away, and the poet told the old man the blackbird’s wonderful story.

“That song new?” said the wanderer. “Not a bit of it. God made it years ago. All the blackbirds used to sing it when I was young. It was new then.”

And afterwards they carved his message upon gold; and read it in their temples on holy days.

When will the Muses rest? When are they weary?

They sent another messenger to the Golden Town. And they gave him a wand of ivory to carry in his hand with all the beautiful stories of the world wondrously carved thereon. And only the Muses could have carved it.

And the three tall sons went in.

And these are Nature’s sons, the forlorn one’s terrible children, War, Famine and Plague.

Yea and they went in there and found Man unawares in his city still poring over his Problems, obsessed with his civilization, and never hearing their tread as those three came up behind.

… slain, and boys with burning spices, and their thin white sacred cats with collars of pearls all newly drawn from sea, they sent huge diamonds down in coffers of teak, and ointment and strange oriental dyes, arrows and armor and the rings of their queen.

“Oho,” said the earthquake in the coolth of the earth, “so they are not the gods.”

When the advertiser saw the cathedral spires over the downs in the distance, he looked at them and wept.

“If only,” he said, “this were an advertisement of Beefo, so nice, so nutritious, try it in your soup, ladies like it.”